In my region of AP Southeast we have like 10 med-high pop, 10 low pop, and the rest being in the middle. Only one server ever hits queue times, the rest don’t even get close to max pop. Peak time on my server (middle) was close to 1200 people out of the 2250 cap.
Outside of the brief peak population time it’s hard to get groups for anything. I waited 3 hours for any elite run for example on a Sunday morning. Saturday night was 2 hours. People at lower levels trying to get help with quests are struggling.
All this leads to is people quitting the game. They lose interest when they can’t progress, or grind elites, or PvP. I’m seeing it a lot on my server and faction. People leaving because they can’t get things done, not enough people/balance for PvP.
If they halved the servers for my region, merging them, then we’d have all servers that would be close to if not full at peak times.
Still, no one has an answer for who controls what territories after a merge. On my server we seem to have two previously large companies controlling 2 of the areas, but are now seemingly dead, or just very inactive. I’d be all for a fresh reset where we buy up land again.
The amount of players they will lose for merging servers on the smaller tier ones will be much more if they happen until all the transfers happen for a week or two.
I think that would cause even more bugs. If the simple server transfer for individual characters already causes problems, what would it look like for an entire server? Even if it is the same world
I don’t want to even start thinking about the pandora box that would be opened if they merged servers now. They can’t even implement character transfers without creating an item and gold duplication exploit with it. Now imagine having to deal with the merger of two separate servers. I bet they don’t even have an idea on how they’re going to do that yet (in regards to territory ownership for example).
The amount of players they’re losing to “this is a dead game” because servers are always even below half pop during peak times, would be more.
As for it being buggy or something, it’s likely easier to merge two servers at a data level then plucking all the individual parts out for one specific player and moving them.
They need to finish once and for all the server transfers before knowing wich servers to merge. But it’s taking too long this should’ve been done by now. The leveling and discovery experience are already gone for most of the people waiting for the transfers to beging with.
Well, considering that AGS can’t even implement server transfers correctly I would imagine that they will wait till their developers graduate Game Development 101 before they try to merge servers. The game is decent but it seems to me like they hired good developers for sound and graphics and let the interns build the rest. Just my $0.02.
The peak for my server being close to 1200, was to mean something like 1100-1200. And that is the absolute peak that is the highest point for minutes before dropping again. Worst case if they matched my server with another of the same size (they could pick one that peaks at 1000), there’d be a queue for a few minutes if that.
The point is people want the servers to feel full, have enough people to get quests done, do elite runs, play outpost rush, etc. Right now my server for example peaks quite late (mightnight) for a lot of the people in my timezone. So it’s possible to even merge in a server that peaks earlier.
Anyways, it might actually be too late now. Looking at the past week (when no one could transfer) the peak has dropped steadily. 680 for Friday night. Looking at all but the few most filled servers in my region over the last week is showing a steady decline in player numbers.